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What’s your name? What do you do?

by adwht

Meet somebody new at a networking or social event, and these are the questions you are likely to get, right? No one asks: “Who are you?” Some time ago, I met with a real estate agent with the intention of making an offer on a commercial property. After exchanging pleasantries, he asked me: Who is [my name]? I already introduced myself, so I paused for a moment, searching for an answer, no doubt with a perplexed look on my face. Then it hit me, he’s not interested in what I do, he’s interested in what I will be bringing to the neighbourhood. In other words, the product or service my business will be offering or the problems I solve. So often our whole identity is locked up in what we do, our role, job title, and if that gets shaken, we lose who we are or who we, through conditioning, thought we were. When we consider who we are, we sometimes default to the negative in comparing ourselves with others: “I’m not good with math”, or “I...

What’s a birthday to you? A milestone moment, but weighing you down with the weight of a millstone or a joyous memory (stone) moment?

by adwht

As a kid I thought turning 50 was old and I have not really given much thought to what life would be like post 50, which brings me to my current reality. So I’m 50 now, yes 50. I don’t feel 50, so call me 50 years young. My wife asked: “Can this birthday celebration be different, can you celebrate with joy?” I have not really celebrated birthdays with parties, except for a couple in my teens, which my parents initiated. For me a birthday had been a milestone moment of what goals I have missed the last year or a moment of reflection on some poor decisions. Especially the big birthdays, where you reflect on the last decade, not a milestone, but more of a crushing millstone moment. Maybe I’ve set too many goals or the goals were unrealistic, but how would you ever achieve something significant if you don’t have anything to aim at? We also make decisions with the information at hand at the time, with hindsight always trumping the “now”, on the...

Sensing a change of season?

by adwht

It’s 6 am, on the dot, as you pull the front door shut behind you and pause for a moment. The crisp fresh air made you pause and reminded you to take a light jacket along for your daily exercise walk. The sun has been sleeping in later and later and the temperature has been dropping steadily. It’s never just one thing, but a combination of little things, building up until a tipping point is reached and you find yourself at the start of a new season. You’ve been sensing the change, but have not prepared for it and now your morning routine is disrupted by finding “that jacket” from last winter. A change of season in life can represent a promotion at work, a career pivot, job loss, health challenge, empty nesting, new baby, etc. and can be for the better or worse… for a season. Either way, on reflection we recognized the signs, yet did not prepare for it, until the tipping point day arrived. The goal to transitioning well to a...

Have you received a special gift, that you treasure deeply, but it’s just gathering dust?

by adwht

I have received a few things over my life that fell in that category. A very rare Montblanc pen from my Dad, 18 years ago, that’s locked away in a safe. I’ve written with it only a few times, as I’m concerned that I may drop it and damage it. Should I want to write with it today, I may need to replace the original refill, as it’s been years since I’ve used it. The reality is someone may inherit this pen and lose it or sell it to spend the money on something else within six months. Likewise, the very first gift my eldest son gave me, paid for from his first job, has been kept untouched, because it is so special to me. I realize now that the set of L’Occitane En Provence fragranced soaps and creams, may have an expiry date and although they may last as a wonderful gesture and live on in a beautiful gift box in my cupboard untouched forever, I have not received the benefit from it...

How do you recognise that you lack margin in your life?

by adwht

It’s your first day back from a short staycation. The “break from routine” you desperately needed, but you can’t get yourself out of bed. Exhausted by the very thought that hitting the cancel button on your phone’s ringing alarm, was like pressing the old routine “play” button. But it’s not the alarm that woke you. You were already awake, like every other morning, even during your few days way. Something has to change, but what? To “rest” is simply not possible. Even if you have nothing “urgent” to do, you feel like you should be doing something. After all, there is so much to do, with ever increasing items on the to do list. Does any of the following sound familiar? You have grown more anxious about the future in recent years. You are exhausted before the day is out and your doctor is saying you should watch your stress levels. Dealing with weird skins conditions? You are procrastinating on certain things that are important but not urgent. Your social language is lacking passion...

On which side of your GAP Year are you?

by adwht

Everyone can experience a Gap year, at any age and a lot of people might have experienced a gap in their momentum this year. What’s a Gap Year? A Gap Year is a period of time (usually a year, but could be shorter) taken either before or after university education, to expand one’s horizons, typically by extensive travel and cross-cultural experiences. Put simply a Gap Year is a pause between two seasons. Although a Gap Year is usually referenced in the context of University studies, I believe the concept applies throughout our lives and could happen at any age. The critical distinction is this: For the year (or period of time) to be a Gap Year, it must fall between “what I just finished/was doing” and “then after I’ll be doing…”. The Gap Year is intrinsically linked to vision. Unless I know what I’ll be doing “after” the Gap Year, it’s not really a Gap Year, is it? Let’s talk vision for a moment. Vision is a picture of your life purpose fulfilled, future...

Could playing the game of life too safely, ultimately rob you of opportunity and vision?

by adwht

What’s your definition of success? Is it vision fulfilled or being in a specific place or position? What if you get there and you are not happy, with no new vision set beyond that point? Maybe you’re a young person with a dream of what success should be, but it seems unattainable so you talk yourself into something else, something easier, something more safe to achieve or maintain. Stay with me (as a not overly sporty person) as I show you what I’ve learned from observing my sons play their favourite sport of soccer (or otherwise known as football). Both love scoring goals and despise conceding same. This naturally places them in an attacking (forward) position, but due to their height, speed and big kick, their coaches invariably choose to assign defender (back) positions to them. This season was no different. The coach asked my eldest, when he met him the first time, what his preferred position was. “Up front, right wing, left wing or striker” was his response. First game and the coach...

What would your life, expressed as a colour scheme, look like?

by adwht

We are all unique, with no two people exactly alike. Even identical twins are unique, with unique life experiences contributing to the uniqueness of each person. Imagine for a moment that you, as a person, is presented by a single colour hue, like a blue or green and your life an extension of this single colour into a palette of colours, representing the good (lighter) and the not so good (darker) times of life. A monochromatic colour is exactly that, a single colour from a base hue, that has been extended through tinting and shades into a colour scheme from the one single colour. Non colours, white and black, are used the create lighter and darker colours, with black added to a colour for shades and white added for tinting. Would your life reflect lighter tints or darker shades? As an artist I always look at the way an object reflects light, which assist me to draw or paint the object. Even the darkest object will reflect light, which defines its shape, texture and...

Does the sun really rise and set?

by adwht

Thinking back to childhood days, a picture of the sun was usually illustrated with a radiant friendly smiling face, invoking feelings of joy. Somewhere right now the sun is rising and somewhere it’s setting, or is it? We all know that it’s actually the earth that’s turning, moving into or out of, the sun’s light. Then there is a solar eclipse, which the earth has no control over, that can also momentarily block the sun’s light. In the same way we can actually turn either towards or away from something like joy, thinking it’s joy that moves into or out of our lives. We can also allow events that’s completely out of our control to rob us of our joy. So most of the time we actually determine if joy is present or absent in our lives and if someone or something tries to rob us or our joy, it’s our response thereto that determines the duration of joy’s absence. I use a very easy system to make sure I live life with joy....

How can your message in a bottle reach two people?

by adwht

So I wanted to do something big, something significant to bring encouragement to thousands of people. Here’s the catch, I didn’t want them to know it was from me, as I’m just the conduit to help unlock vision, joy, hope, love and peace. I was trying to find one thing, one message, I could bottle so to speak and launch into the big blue sea, hoping it would reach the masses, without it just ending up on a pollution statistic somewhere. Breakthrough came… I shared my heart with a Pastor friend of mine about the burning desire to do something significant to which he responded that we only need to encourage two people that each in turn encourages two other people and so on and so on… “Soon it will be something big, something that is significant.” One year ago on this day I launched this blog with a single post and without any promotion or telling anyone about it. No different than putting a single message in a bottle and launching it into...

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